If you want to improve the world as much as possible, what should you do with your career? Should you become a doctor, an engineer or a politician? Should you try to end global poverty, climate change, or international conflict? These are the questions that the research group, 80,000 Hours tries to answer. They try to figure out how individuals can set themselves up to help as many people as possible in as big a way as possible.

To learn more about their research, Ariel invited Rob Wiblin and Brenton Mayer of 80,000 Hours to the FLI podcast. In this podcast we discuss "earning to give", building career capital, the most effective ways for individuals to help solve the world's most pressing problems -- including artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, biotechnology and climate change. If you're interested in tackling these problems, or simply want to learn more about them, this podcast is the perfect place to start.

80,000 Hours with Rob Wiblin and Brenton Mayer

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How are we to make progress on AI alignment given moral uncertainty?  What are the ideal ways of resolving conflicting value systems and views of morality among persons? How ought we to go about AI alignment given that we are unsure about our normative and metaethical theories? How should preferences be aggregated and persons idealized in the context of our uncertainty? 

Moral Uncertainty and the Path to AI Alignment with William MacAskill is the fifth podcast in the new AI Alignment series, hosted by Lucas Perry. For those of you that are new, this series will be covering and exploring the AI alignment problem across a large variety of domains, reflecting the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment. Broadly, we will be having discussions with technical and non-technical researchers across areas such as machine learning, AI safety, governance, coordination, ethics, philosophy, and psychology as they pertain to the project of creating beneficial AI. If this sounds interesting to you, we hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, or your preferred podcast site/application.

If you're interested in exploring the interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment, we suggest you take a look here at a preliminary landscape which begins to map this space.

In this podcast, Lucas spoke with William MacAskill. Will is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and is a co-founder of the Center for Effective Altruism, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 Hours. Will helped to create the effective altruism movement and his writing is mainly focused on issues of normative and decision theoretic uncertainty, as well as general issues in ethics.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Will’s current normative and metaethical credences
-The value of moral information and moral philosophy
-A taxonomy of the AI alignment problem
-How we ought to practice AI alignment given moral uncertainty
-Moral uncertainty in preference aggregation
-Moral uncertainty in deciding where we ought to be going as a society
-Idealizing persons and their preferences
-The most neglected portion of AI alignment

AIAP: Moral Uncertainty and the Path to AI Alignment with William MacAskill

The barista gives you your coffee and change, and you walk away from the busy line. But you suddenly realise she gave you $1 less than she should have. Do you brush your way past the people now waiting, or just accept this as a dollar you’re never getting back? According to philosophy Professor Hilary Greaves - Director of Oxford University's <a href="https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org">Global Priorities Institute</a>, which <a href="https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/opportunities/">is hiring</a> - this simple decision will completely change the long-term future by altering the identities of almost all future generations. 

How? Because by rushing back to the counter, you slightly change the timing of everything else people in line do during that day - including changing the timing of the interactions they have with everyone else. Eventually these causal links will reach someone who was going to conceive a child. 

By causing a child to be conceived a few fractions of a second earlier or later, you change the sperm that fertilizes their egg, resulting in a totally different person. So asking for that $1 has now made the difference between all the things that this actual child will do in their life, and all the things that the merely possible child - who didn't exist because of what you did - would have done if you decided not to worry about it. 

As that child's actions ripple out to everyone else who conceives down the generations, ultimately the entire human population will become different, all for the sake of your dollar. Will your choice cause a future Hitler to be born, or not to be born? Probably both! 

<a href="https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/hilary-greaves-global-priorities-institute/?utm_campaign=podcast__hilary-greaves&amp;utm_source=80000+Hours+Podcast&amp;utm_medium=podcast" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.</a> 

Some find this concerning. The actual long term effects of your decisions are so unpredictable, it looks like you’re totally clueless about what's going to lead to the best outcomes. It might lead to decision paralysis - you won’t be able to take any action at all. 

Prof Greaves doesn’t share this concern for most real life decisions. If there’s no reasonable way to assign probabilities to far-future outcomes, then the possibility that you might make things better in completely unpredictable ways is more or less canceled out by equally likely opposite possibility. 

But, if instead we’re talking about a decision that involves highly-structured, systematic reasons for thinking there might be a general tendency of your action to make things better or worse -- for example if we increase economic growth -- Prof Greaves says that we don’t get to just ignore the unforeseeable effects. 

When there are complex arguments on both sides, it's unclear what probabilities you should assign to this or that claim. Yet, given its importance, whether you should take the action in question actually does depend on figuring out these numbers. So, what do we do? 

Today’s episode blends philosophy with an exploration of the mission and research agenda of the Global Priorities Institute: to develop the effective altruism movement within academia. We cover: 

* How controversial is the multiverse interpretation of quantum physics? 
* Given moral uncertainty, how should population ethics affect our real life decisions? 
* How should we think about archetypal decision theory problems? 
* What are the consequences of cluelessness for those who based their donation advice on GiveWell style recommendations? 
* How could reducing extinction risk be a good cause for risk-averse people? 

Get this episode by subscribing: type '80,000 Hours' into your podcasting app. 

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.

#46 - Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia

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#46 - Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia

The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin

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